A pretty adult situation, no, wouldn’t you think, with Selina now tightening the belt of her sheer negligée (and gazing down disclaimingly – even she won’t forgive me), and Martina fixed in the frame of the doorway, in a suit of light-grey worsted, black shoes together (and what did she see? Brute hard-on, gut, the frightened face) – and me, the decked joke, flummoxed, scuppered, and waving his arms? I’ve had some naked travel but never quite as naked as this, not even in the Boomerang off Sunset Boulevard, sprawling under the pimp’s bat.

A pretty adult situation, and yet Martina looked like a child. She looked like a child who has suffered more reverses in a single day than ever before in living memory, and is now poised between refusal and acceptance of the fact that life might be significantly worse than she thought, that life was unkinder in its essence, and no one had given her fair warning.